Good Reviews of Bad Books, Woodward Edition

Some day, I hope to visit Noam Scheiber's house so I can see the lovely mahogany breakfront in which he has on display Bob Woodward's spleen, which Scheiber pretty much removes in his review of Woodward's latest doorstop.

That Woodward is a self-important blowhard whose best work was 40 years ago has been pretty well established for quite some time now, but not many people have limned the essential blowhardiness the way that Scheiber does here....

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But, in another sense, the book is perfectly in sync with Woodward's oeuvre. There is a body of respectable Washington opinion that considers Obama unworthy of the presidency: he hadn't put in his time before running, didn't grasp the majesty of the office, evinced no respect for the way things were done. He not only won without courting the city's elders, he had the bad manners to keep his distance even after winning. This is the view Woodward distills. Woodward telegraphs his contempt from the get-go. He sets his prologue in 2006 at the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the sort of stuffed-shirt affair Washington journalists spend their early careers dreaming of, and the rest of their careers trying to avoid. The keynote speaker was then-Senator Obama, who joked about how overhyped he was only a year into his term. It sounds like winning shtick, but Woodward, a kind of unofficial mascot at these gatherings, is morose. "Obama had not once mentioned the party or high purpose. His speech, instead, was about Obama, his inexperience, and in the full paradox of the moment, what he had not done," he belches. "Two and a half years later, he was president-elect of the United States." Oooo-kaaay then.

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And thus does everyone at The Washington Post eventually turn into Sally Quinn. She's like a social-climbing Borg.

I would quibble a bit with Scheiber's contention that this book is in any way a departure from earlier Woodward andirons. But I can't take issue with the basic premise as outlined above, since I had my own run-in with the great man a few years back, when I was working on a piece about a little boy who died because the Supplemental Security Income program on which his life depended had been devoured by a Beltway feeding frenzy in which Woodward's journalistic malpractice played a key role....

Before she left, however, Porter contacted Bob Woodward, outlining her concerns, which was how Jonathan Stein came to be on the telephone with him. Stein suspected that Woodward was ready to cast Nora Cooke Porter as an embattled whistle-blower and suggested that Woodward might want to check with her superiors in Harrisburg to make sure that he wasn't hanging his story on the office crank. "He berated me," Stein recalls. "How come you're telling me this so late? My reply was that I'd just learned that they were going to use her and that I thought he should know. He just brushed me off, told me it was too late." Woodward declined to comment on this phone conversation. "How long have you been in the business?" he asked me when contacted for this article. "Can you remember everything about a story you did five years ago?"

Since that day, I have relished every small chance I've had to tell Bob Woodward publicly to piss off and die. I'd like to thank Noam Scheiber for providing me with my latest opportunity.